


go out the door

by karanguni



Category: Táng Cháo | Tang Dynasty RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Chinese Mythology & Folklore, Gen, IN SPACE!, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 11:06:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13075563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: The others called it more bad luck. Good terrestrial weather had not been necessary for launching supplies and small-scale ships into orbit for a generation, not since the advent of space-based guidance systems to assist with the telemetry. But Wang Chengzong had taken down their near-earth systems almost a month ago: as it stood, the Lu Zhou encampment could send up no reinforcements to the greater fleet beyond. The black clouds and persistent rain cloaking their base only served to remind the Imperial forces stationed there of as much.For his part, Li He had dug himself a hole.





	go out the door

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Quillori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillori/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I can't thank you enough for this prompt, because through it I have discovered Li He, and so I hope you'll enjoy this strange little romp!
> 
> (For anyone else who wants to pick this canon up, I highly recommend looking at Quillori's excellent letter! [Here.](https://quillori.dreamwidth.org/25102.html#TRPF))

Lu Zhou was a bitter place. Bitter was the right word, and bitter was this bad town, and bitter were the ones who occupied it. The skies had been overcast for a month.

The others called it more bad luck. Good terrestrial weather had not been necessary for launching supplies and small-scale ships into orbit for a generation, not since the advent of space-based guidance systems to assist with the telemetry. But Wang Chengzong had taken down their near-earth systems almost a month ago: as it stood, the Lu Zhou encampment could send up no reinforcements to the greater fleet beyond. The black clouds and persistent rain cloaking their base only served to remind the Imperial forces stationed there of as much.

For his part, Li He had dug himself a hole.

That was not entirely true: he had asked some of the men to dig him a hole, and they had obliged. Li He had simply pointed out where it was to be dug — a fifteen minute walk away from the core of the base, out beyond a copse of trees up against a large outcrop of rock — and they had gone at it with an excavator borrowed from who knows where. Li He’d sat on a stump while they’d dug, watching and waiting until they struck something: then the excavator had to be quickly pulled out and away, because their hole was now a spring.

After that, many combat engineers had bent their heads together and, after some work, Li He’s hot spring — as it came to be known — was ready for general use. It was not anything particularly glamorous: the engineers had stood up a small shack for storing one’s clothes and boots, then paved the way from the shack to the pool by laying down some large flat rocks, and that was all.

Still, the spring raised morale. Soldiers driven stir-crazy by being land-bound bathed away their frustration; engineers came to soften their work-calloused hands. Naked but warm, men forgot their ranks and their troubles as they drank lousy wine under winter’s frozen moon. Their songs were atrocious, bawdy, and rough, but only the roughness set them apart from the songs that officials and rich men’s sons had sung in the capital. Li He improvised, and gave them better things to sing:

Blow dragon flutes!  
Beat alligator drums!  
Dazzling teeth in song,  
Slender waists in dance.  
Especially now when green, spring days  
Are turning to dusk,  
With peach-petals falling wildly  
Like pink showers.  
I beg you now to stay quite drunk  
To the end of your days,  
For on the earth of Liu Ling’s grave  
No one pours wine!

吹龍笛，  
擊鼉鼓；  
皓齒歌，  
細腰舞。  
況是青春日將暮，  
桃花亂落如紅雨。  
勸君終日酩酊醉，  
酒不到劉伶墳上土！[1]

They built, in his honour, a special seat on the side of the pool closest to where the spring-source was. Someone with a chisel and too much time had shoved stone and stone together and made Li He a half-submerged chair.

‘A better perch from which to teach the rest of us how it’s done!’ he’d declared the first day Li He had used it. ‘Now drink some more wine and give us another couplet, master. How did you  _know_  this would be here?’

Li He had smiled and said nothing, but a night owl had hooted over his head before spreading its wings and flying across the camp, and when it did it cast an immortal’s shadow down over them all.

When he was in the baths, Li He let himself drink. The humid air around the hot spring hurt his lungs, and he coughed up blood aplenty in payment, but death itself did not scare him. It was only dying that angered Li He: he had hardly lived, and the years that he had been given were bitter. And so here he was: a bitter man dying a bitter death in a bitter town. But at least he was warm.

Still, one could not spend all of one’s time in the baths. There were duties at hand for Li He to fulfil: low in office but gifted with words, he knew that he had been dispatched to Lu Zhou because history needed an official witness. He was here on the front to record it: their victories, which had been few, and their failures, which had been numerous if never catastrophic. Someone in Changan would one day, if he and the men around him had any luck, read his reports and consider his judgements. Defeat could still be noble, just as victory could be dishonourably achieved.

So when Li He was well enough, and sober enough, he watched. He watched the men at work in the workshops; he watched the officers at work at their radios. He watched the guards waste away at the forward stations, eyes bloodshot from watching the monitors for signs of attack on the main fleet too many thousands of miles away for them to help. But most of all, he watched their commander.

Xi Shimei, governor of Zhaoyi, had been groundside the day that Wang Chengzong’s men had sabotaged their guidance systems. It was too dangerous to try sending even resupply rockets beyond orbit, much less their commanding officer in a one-man fighter, and so Xi was grounded alongside the rest of them. He was an excellent pilot, but Wang’s men had left behind them a minefield of explosives that now crowded Lu Zhou’s orbit; like a deadly fly-swarm, they were impossible to navigate manually, and their constantly decaying velocities were wreaking havoc on everything in near-space. Never mind getting out out the immediate volume and to the front: even their extant data and utility satellites were getting rammed into and detonated. It was warfare on an immense scale. Chengde was unafraid to stand its ground, and its defiance was both impressive and effective. Xi was one of the only reasons the Imperial army was still in contention to begin with. A talented general and a fair governor of Zhaoyi and a good man, he won many soldiers willing to be turned into grist for the imperial grindstone.

The governor was therefore understandably frustrated at being separated from the fleet, but Li He had also seen him deeply troubled by the fact that this terrible sabotage been successful in no small part because of defectors from their own side. Xi was a good officer: he knew that the strongest wall starts to crumble from its weakest point, however small that point may be. He wanted to get back topside: he  _needed_  to, both to rejoin his officers but also to help reestablish the guidance systems and weed out mutiny before it could further spread.

Li He knew Xi read every meteorology report. He was grim in the face each time. While Xi had managed small victories where the other commanders before him had managed none, another setback was like as not to shatter what little was left of morale. They needed to get something off the ground before this war of attrition eroded away all will to fight.

Li He was neither a meteorologist nor an engineer — only a poet — but he knew what he knew: send up a ship now, without proper telemetry, and it would crash into grey-walled heaven before it ever got to the Chengde front. Lightning would hurl the shattered remains of both vessel and crew back down, and it would snow grey ash: all that was left would neither need nor get a burial.

It had happened before. A launch had been attempted a week after the net of mines had been deployed above them. It had not gone well.

Two days afterwards, on a walk through the woods to clear his mind and to escape from the suffocating malaise of the camp, Li He saw a nest of four crows born with white wings and pink eyes. Four crewmen had died in the crash.

The days dragged on. Li He alternated between two roles: magistrate and jester. It was not unlike how his life had been before; if one is destined to suffer, one might as well make the most of it. For half his adult life, Li He had written poetry born out of wine and song. Now for what was left of it, he would write verses for dead men, and dying ones, too. There was a circularity to it that helped him sleep most nights.

On nights where sleep eluded him, Li He walked. It made his host, Chang Che, apoplectic with worry that he was going out in pitch-black night on his own, but Li He had never in his life been in want nor need of a guide in darkness.

Palefire burnt along the edges of the camp at night; a constant marker of where civilisation ended and the wild began. Fog-of-war roiled beyond, sometimes creeping in, sometimes evaporating to nothing. Li He had watched it grow thicker and colder as the days went on: there was despair enough in Lu Zhou to feed it. The blue eyes of raccoons shone like firefly lights in the far hills, blinking now and then as candles do when guttering in the wind.

At one point in his life, Li He would have said to himself:  _do not go out the door_. What good did it ever do to leave the safety of a warm house?

Heaven is inscrutable,  
Earth keeps its secrets.  
The nine-headed monster consumes human souls;  
Frost and snow break human bones.

天迷迷，  
地密密。  
熊虺食人魂，  
雪霜斷人骨。[2]

But those days felt as far behind him as heaven felt from Li He now. What bad could come to a man who was ready to die? There were no terrors left in the night, only a collection of future neighbours.

On the coldest of nights, like tonight, a white horse would come to him at the start of the woods. It was here again tonight, and though he had never been much of a rider, Li He could take it — bridleless and sans saddle — through the trees. They stopped underneath the four-crow tree, and Li He lit four sticks of incense at its base. He watched the red glow of their tips burn down to nothing. When they were spent, he took up with the horse again, and let it lead.

It took him to the top of a bald hill. The trees were wind-whipped and had branches only on their leeside, and even those were naked under snow. Li He sat atop the horse’s back and watched the moon as it drooped down low in the sky. A rabbit scampered down its round white face, and hopped down from the celestial spheres and onto Li He’s lap.

‘You are very warm,’ Li He told the rabbit, stroking its folded back ears. ‘You would make a nice pair of mufflers.’

The rabbit bit him on the hand, but gently. Li He heard a woman laugh behind him, the sound of it like silver bells echoing over ice.

He turned his horse, trying not to displace his guest from his lap. Chang E, resplendent in silk, stood in the unmarked snow a few paces away.

‘Hello,’ said Li He to the goddess of the moon, for want of anything better to say. ‘I have not heard a woman’s voice since I got here.’

She said nothing, which was disappointing. Li He patted the rabbit. ‘Do you want him back now?’

She shook her head. She walked towards him, though Li He knew better than to look for footprints in the snow. Chang E laced one hand through his free arm and turned them both back to looking at the sky. The grand river of stars shone bright against the black of space that evening; Li He could hear them sing. For a while, they stayed simply watching as, every now and then, a star or five would wink out and then blink back: those were all mines passing overhead, blocking out the light.

‘Why are you here?’ he asked Chang E eventually.

She pointed, sleeves billowing up on some wind that Li He could not feel. He looked where she indicated, and watched as some of the constellations started to burn in a different light. They made a bridge, impossible but true. It led from the camp’s launch platform and into the sky.

Li He felt the rabbit nuzzle at his hand. When he looked down, it had a vial in its mouth. He took it and held it up against the light of the moon, and when he looked down again from the elixir in his hand, both the rabbit and Chang E were gone.

* * *

Li He lay in wait outside of Meteorology the next afternoon, waiting for Governor Xi to emerge. It was raining again, but he waited nonetheless, umbrella in hand to ward against the downpour.

When Xi stepped out at last, Li He called out to him, ‘You could send a ship up. I can tell you how.’

Xi stopped in his tracks and turned to look at him. ‘I am trying to decide,’ he said eventually, stepping under the shade of the umbrella and starting them down the path to his office, ‘if you mean that as a general statement of possibility — I  _could_  send some men to die; we have the technology for it — or if there is some deeper meaning here that I cannot divine. Do you think Meteorology is wrong? Or are you trying in some roundabout way to tell me that this entire campaign is futile?’ He walked apace beside Li He, and weary though Xi surely was, he attempted a smile.

Li He smiled in return. ‘Poets do not  _always_  have ulterior motives when we speak.’

‘Not always,’ Xi agreed. ‘Only most of the time. It is the job of a poet to record and critique, much as it is my job to win campaigns.’

‘Even great generals must go to the privy,’ Li He retorted, ‘and even bad poets must be allowed to speak plainly.’

Xi paused. ‘I’m not sure about the  _quality_  of that couplet, but if you are comparing your plain speech to the shit that comes out of my ass…’

Li He burst out into genuine laughter, hard enough that he had to cover his mouth with his sleeve. It was the first time he had laughed for as long as he could remember — he managed black humour and irony; wore them like armour — but a jest for the sake of jesting? Not in months. When he pulled back his sleeve, speckles of bright red patterned the worn grey cotton.

Xi frowned. ‘You’re getting worse.’

Li He was dispassionate. ‘The state of my closet is equally abominable,’ he quipped, brushing Xi’s concern aside. ‘I should start carrying a handkerchief, or I will look more soldier than scholar at this rate.’

Xi pursed his lips but did not push the matter. He continued walking them towards his office, and Li He was glad for it. The lamps beyond the pale were being lit, beckoning. Li He was being called for.

It was, at least, warmer in the governor’s office. Xi, a vital man who by nature lacked any imagination, actually repelled fog-of-war like a fire dispelled cold. It stayed out of his office, limiting itself to whispered susurrations from the foot of the door. Still, the rain pounded against the double-glazed windows of the room, melting everything beyond into a smeared ink landscape that drip-drip-dripped down the glass panes. The weather was not improving.

Li He laboured into a chair. Xi was already at the lacquered tea set over by the kettle, pouring hot water over the teapot and cups to prepare them.

Li He thought: Here, now, is a man who could take a blue fox from the deepest hell and tame it into some imitation of a living and loyal hound. If there were any justice in heaven to match the injustice on earth, the stars should dance for him. Since there is not, I will.

Xi put the tea set down on the table between them; there was a brush and a pad of paper there on the tray as well. ‘In case a thought or a couplet happens to come to you,’ Xi said.

Li He picked up the brush and saluted with it. Xi laughed, and poured him the first steep of tea. The smell of strong, well-aged tea perfumed the air; Li He accepted his cup gratefully.

‘You were saying about a ship?’ Xi prompted him once Li He was done drinking. ‘That we could send one up - how? Our best pilots have said the task is beyond them.  _I_  wouldn’t fly it — and I wouldn’t send anyone else to, either.’

Li He did not answer the question outright. ‘I heard the engineers talking, the other day, about a ship that could clear the mines — something about a net? The technicalities are beyond me. But they say that it is something that can be done.’

He watched Xi drink his own tea. ‘That is true,’ he said, voice measured. ‘But it has to survive some time in orbit first, enough to clear a volume of space to work in. The likelihood of that is slim; the better alternative is still to wait for backup from the fleet to arrive and work the problem from the other side.’

It would take another week and a half for the first of the rescue ships to come. ‘We cannot afford the time,’ he observed. ‘Supplies on the front are running dry, are they not?’ Xi nodded. Li He set his cup down. ‘Emperor Xianzong was wise and the son of heaven,’ he began, and saw that Xi was at once alarmed to hear the emperor’s name evoked. Li He did not stop. ‘But the son of heaven resides in Changan, not here on the gritty borderlands doing endless battle against the last of the warlords. You watch, daily, men live and die on your command. That is a tremendous burden to bear.’

‘Where are you going with this?’ Xi asked, fingers tight around his teacup.

‘What does it take to catch an orbital mine?’ Li He asked lightly. ‘Will a butterfly net do?’

Hearing Xi Shimei sputter was, Li He knew, one of the finer things to hear towards the end of a man’s mortal life.

* * *

At the end of the day, they could not stop him. Most celestial things are inevitable. Chang Che begged him to come to his senses; pleaded with Xi Shimei that Li He’s consumption and the abominable state of the Lu Zhou encampment had surely driven the poet mad. But no one could stop Li He from doing impossible things: they could not conceive what to do with a man who said he was going to fly himself to the moon and dance on the bridge of stars.

The engineers told him to take bed rest when he asked  _them_  what net would do. So Li He rummaged around a storeroom and found an old river-fisherman’s net, ripped in places and full of patches and soon to be stronger than spiderwebs and silk.

That night, a full moon rose and lit his way. The elixir of immortality, when swallowed, burnt like the eighteen levels of hell had all come aflame in his throat. Li He stepped up into the sky, net over his shoulders, and fished for death so that the mortals below would live.

He was twenty-seven years old, and undying.

**Author's Note:**

> [1] Bring the Wine/將進酒, quoted from http://www.reed.edu/chinese/courses/323/drinking2.html and original from http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de/liho/LIHO.HTML  
> [1.1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Ling_(poet) and http://confucius.ucdavis.edu/local_resources/js/Yeh_Bring%20the%20Wine.pdf, seriously, scroll to see naked Liu Ling  
> [2] Adapted from Do Not Go Out The Door/公無出門 via http://www.cjvlang.com/Pfloyd/liho2.html


End file.
